When I started doing SEO years ago, it took very little effort to get a website at the top of search lists. All you had to do was make sure you included your keyword phrase in the correct tags on the web page. All these elements of the page are still required and relevant, which is why the search engine optimization on the page has hardly changed; you’ll still have to tell the major search engines what your page is targeting.
However, it is the off-page SEO (backlinks pointing to your website or blog) that explains to search engines not what your website is related to (on-page optimization will accomplish this), but how central your site is in terms of what it is all about, plus how more valuable it is than the rest of the rival websites.
So, here are the things you need to win in On-Page Search Engine Optimization.
- It should have a lot of good and related content, a minimum of 700 words on each web page.
- Use your keyword phrase and also its variants once or twice in the content of the page.
- Include the key phrase in the label
as well as in the location of the meta keywords and in the location of the description of the header of the web page. (But don’t forget that search engines often use description in the results lists, so make it attractive so that the user chooses to see your website in the results lists and take a look at your page instead of another site. ). - Also put the keyphrase inside the heading tags
,
Y
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- If you have images on the page, or a movie, put your key phrase or variants of it, within the meta tags
that belong to the images. - Make sure that all the words or phrases within the keyword meta area are also in the observable written content of the web page.
- Make sure your website has the necessary and useful pages, such as the Privacy Policy, About Us web page, Help page, Terms of Service page, 404 page, and as applicable, Disclaimer . Make sure there are links to these pages from the home page and all additional web pages, so that all pages can be accessed from any other page with a single click.
- Increase Dwell Time and Minimize Bounce Rate – Keep your visitors on your website for as long as possible by engaging people by using helpful content, like a movie clip or quiz, for example. At the same time, integrate indented listings – Google loves bullet lists. If visitors click after just a couple of seconds, search engines like Google will pick up on that and determine that the site is not what users want to see, and your SERPS search ranking will drop as a direct consequence. You can see your bounce rate through your Google Analytics data (you use Google Analytics, don’t you?).
- Keep your site loading time short. The most effective strategy to avoid a long loading time is to reduce the size of (that is, the size in Kb and not in pixels). There are free tools available to accomplish this, such as http://www.reduceimages.com/ and http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx. This is also known as file compression.
- Include a robots.txt file and upload it to your server.
- Include an XML sitemap file and upload it to your server.
- Include an .htaccess file with code to deal with canonical URLs.
Stick to all of these ground rules and you’ll be ready for search engine optimization best practices in 2017.